Everything that was ever to happen to me in the future had its germ or impulse in the conditions of my life on Dover Street. My fr...iendships, my advantages and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of America. My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the saddest sights of the slums is to see the thrifty wife of the working man, with her rosy brood of children, used to cou...ntry air and sunshine, used to space, privacy, good surroundings, cleanliness, quiet, shut up amid the noise and dirt and confusion, in the gloom of the slum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Go into the streets, into the slums, into the fashionable quarters. Go into the day courts and the night courts. Become acquainted... with sorrow, with many kinds of sorrow. Learn of the wonderful heroism of the poor, of the incredible generosity of the very poor--a generosity of which the rich and the well-to-do have, for the most part, not the faintest conception. Go into the modest homes, into the out-of-the-way corners, into the open country. Go where you can find something fresh to bring back to the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of su...ch varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At no time in history ... have the people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to pretend that society is n...ot fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is at present a passport to society--so much the parlor philanthropists have achieved--and all they have to do is to prove that they know their subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they are not doing their duty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outf...its that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to... the desolation of an empty abundance. It is a strange part of the other America that one finds in the intellectual slums.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopeles...sness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »